In which a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990's moves into academic administration and finds himself a married suburban father of two. Foucault, plus lawn care. Comments are welcome. Comments for general readership can be posted directly after the blog entry. For private comments, I can be reached at deandad at gmail dot com. The opinions expressed here are my own (or those of commenters), and not those of my (unnamed) employer.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

The First Time as Tragedy...

I’m just old enough to have seen ideas I had thought long dead come back to life. They’re typically about as attractive as the undead can be expected to be. During the 90’s and early 00’s, an idea originally floated by Barry Goldwater and considered wacky -- turning Social Security over to the stock market -- had a brief and scary second life. (Perhaps predictably, it was felled by a long bear market.) Now, we’re starting to see variations on indentured servitude come back.

In the earlier version of indentured servitude, people in other countries would agree to work for specific employers for shockingly low pay for a set number of years upon arrival in the new world, in exchange for passage to the new world. The idea was that they would pay off their travel through underpaid labor for an extended period. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, I was taught that this was a form of barbarism that had been consigned to the past.

It’s returning, but this time with application to college tuition rather than seafare.

In some cases, the patron is a state. For example, Oregon is considering a bill whereby students could enroll without any upfront tuition, but would have to pledge three percent of their earnings for the first twenty years after graduation.

It’s a peculiar conceit on a number of levels. First, and most obviously, it would require the state to front the lost revenue to the college or university for many years before any sort of payback would kick in. I haven’t noticed a trend of states suddenly wanting to double or triple their appropriations.

Second, by taking federal student aid off the table, it would effectively displace federal dollars with state dollars. That means that states would have to increase their appropriations by even more, just to keep the colleges even. And the taxpayers of, say, Oregon, would pay federal taxes to support student aid in other states that students in Oregon wouldn’t get. That would be on top of the support they’d have to increase for Oregon itself. Conceptually, it’s possible, but politically, I’d consider it astonishing.

Third, it’s not obvious to me how Oregon would enforce collection across state lines.

Fourth, “the first twenty years” doesn’t necessarily mean the first twenty years. Students who immediately go to grad school, say, wouldn’t generate much payback. Given the realities of “adverse selection,” I’d expect to see students who are targeting graduate school to enroll in this plan, and students majoring in, say, computer science avoiding it like the plague.

That’s because -- fifth -- some students would wind up paying back far more than they ever would have owed. The students to whom that would apply would probably figure that out early on, and avoid the plan. That would leave the plan with the most “expensive” students, setting in motion a death spiral.

Sixth, though -- and I’m a little surprised that few commentaries mention this one -- it would cap college and university revenues at the level of entry-level wage growth. Given that any labor-intensive enterprise will inevitably see costs increase faster than the economy as a whole, this is a recipe for long-term austerity. (And that’s before factoring in any sort of tax revolt by high earners.) If we want higher education to remain more than MOOCs, we’ll need to come to terms with the fact of it being labor-intensive. We haven’t done a good job of that so far -- the trend towards adjunctification being the most spectacular example -- but simply denying it altogether will only lead to collapse. Transformation isn’t cheap.

Predictably enough, states aren’t the only patrons interested in this model. Some private investors are putting up tuition money in exchange for cuts of future earnings of students who are likely to make big money.

The private model is at least immune to the objection of displacing federal money with state money. But it replaces the “adverse selection” death spiral with a pure focus on high potential earners. If you’re a future hedge fund trader, you’re appealing; if you’re a future social worker, they want no part of you. From an ROI perspective, I get that, but in terms of the public good, it’s catastrophic.

Indentured servitude collapsed for some good reasons. I’d like to see it crawl back under the historical rock from which it crawled, to be replaced instead by funding mechanisms that reflect both the reality of labor-intensive industries and the necessity of paying attention to the social good. Let’s not replace a flawed system with a dead one.

My partner has a lot of student loan debt. A lot. Right now, our most likely path to get it paid off is income based repayment and 10 years of full time work for a nonprofit entity. Given that income based repayment is capped at 10% of earnings, 3% just doesn't scandalize me. While I agree with many of your logistical objections, I don't think you'll get anywhere with arguments about unseemliness of indentured servitude in this culture.

As a historian who studies indentured servitude, this is not it. In indentured servitude, you had no choice about who to work for or what work to do. You didn't keep any earnings. In this model, you do whatever work you do, and t’s either your 97% of your earnings.

Where this model is used for student loans (as in Becca's partner's case, it works. It's both predictable, and usually much less of a burden, and probably a more manageable one, than our current system. In fact, for most people, this is probably a better deal. And pay it forward is not a bad approach.

I'd rather think of it as a reverse insurance: sure, there are people who would pay back more than their education cost. But there are years when you pay more for your auto insurance than you have in claims.

Three per cent is not much if you are making a living wage. If you are a artist, 3% can mean the difference between eating and, well, not. The real answer is that taxpayers should fully fund higher ed like other developed countries do. But since we have never really fully funded K-12, and are well on the path to privatizing it all, I won't get my hopes up. I will advise young people to check out colleges in other countries, though.

If Oregon had a 3% sales tax, this could be funded and more. Alas, sales tax is regressive and they don't collect it. Choices, choices!

Why is it more acceptable to charge 3% of income for 20 years than to charge 0.5% sales tax on everyone? Or to increase income tax? Have we completely lost sight of the fact that people getting an education is beneficial to all and therefore worth subsidizing? I would very much resent as an engineer subsidizing my lower wage counterparts for two decades. A tax that I could pretend was paying for police and parks would be infinitely more palatable. I'm sure the wealthy love this as it leaves them totally off the hook in paying for the education that allows them to make their billions. Sorry but this doesn't pass the stink test for me.

Once the powers that be realize that STEM majors are avoiding such a program like the plague, they'll adjust the tuition to bring it in line with the actual cost of the corresponding education. Thus, STEM majors will be charged twice the tuition of liberal arts/social science/education majors.

STEM majors will thus be required to remit 5% of their salary for 20 years instead of 3% because their degree is "worth more."

And then the powers that be will declare that the new system is more "fair."

This system will, of course, lead to a paucity of STEM majors, which will lead corporations, in turn, to lobby Congress to raise the cap on H1B visas.

Ah, Anon. It's so cute you think that lobbying congress for more H1B visas has anything to do with ACTUAL shortages of scientifically trained workforce, instead of simple desires to pay everybody below a living wage, and DOUBLY so for those STEM-y bastards, the nerds.

Up here in the Great White North, companies regularly use the Harper Government™'s temporary foreign worker program to avoid paying decent wages. Can't get people to work at your MacDonald's franchise? Get some temporary foreign workers rather than offer higher wages. Those pesky miners want too much money: declare that speaking Mandarin is an essential job skill and import Chinese miners. (Special bonus: they won't complain about safety issues either!)

Capital and the rich are free to move around — the rest of us are increasingly tied in place.